Mumbai: Global media, entertainment and technology portfolio of ventures Eros Investments has announced a strategic collaboration with IIT Bombay to design and develop an AI-based tool for automatic script generation.
Named Kurosawa, after the celebrated Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, the software will assist film makers in developing the plot and script of movies by generating a full-length feature film script. IIT Bombay will also create a whitepaper on Kurosawa for academic and research purposes.
The teams from IIT Bombay and Eros have been collaborating on Kurosawa for over a year. Kurosawa will help identify the right genre, output logline, and synopsis and deliver a potentially hit script that can be customized further as required. In the current phase, Kurosawa can generate multiple engaging plots and scenes basis single input. For example, it can create genre-specific movie plots, basic genre(s) and a short 2-3 sentence prompt. It can also create scenes in a standard screenplay format basis a brief description.
Automatic Movie Script Generation is a subfield of Natural Language Generation (NLG). The machine can learn plot and scene generation from the pre-existing data with minimum human intervention.
Eros Investments director Swaneet Singh said, " This association between Eros Investments and IIT Bombay is an excellent example of the amalgamation of the left and right brain. Kurosawa is a pioneering and cutting-edge technology that will revolutionize the entertainment sector. The tool will enable scriptwriters to focus on creativity and quality while doing the groundwork for them. This innovation marks a new milestone for Eros Investments that will be used as a case study in the future."
IIT Bombay dean of research and development Prof. Milind Atrey, added, "Kurosawa will be a huge opportunity to transform the art of storytelling with proficiency and improve efficiency for content creators. We welcome collaboration with Eros investments, led by Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya from IIT Bombay, to provide automation to the process of scripting in the entertainment industry. As the outcome of the research, IIT Bombay will also be jointly launching a white paper on Kurosawa that will be used for academic and research purposes, further supporting the upcoming generation looking to make a mark in the industry."
Kurosawa is based on the latest deep learning and natural language processing technologies. It is led by Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya, known for his artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise, and an internationally renowned research group. He is a professor in the computer science and engineering department at IIT Bombay and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (2015) and Abdul Kalam National Fellow (2020). Prof. Bhattacharyya is supported in this project by the students from IIT Bombay who are a part of the curriculum.
